Saturday, January 30, 2010

Each of these elements is created separately and then arranged within Photoshop as individual layers. I even keep the element's PSD files to even keep my options open for tweaking the building blocks within the final piece. Of course, that means my storage space gets eaten up very quickly.

Scroll back a within the last few postings, and see some of the elements as individual pieces.

Jason is FOCUSED on the job at hand... Drilling a hole into the head of the victim in his 1955 Cadillac's big ole' trunk. The project has the tagline: PSYCHOTIC HILLBILLIES CRAZED FOR CARNAGE!

The guys in the Deadneks have their debut DVD coming out, with the premier in early April called "Trilogy of Blood" - It's some hard-driving Psycho-Billy rocknroll, and I have the task of delivering the DVD box, T-design, fliers and poster... All on the cheap, since they're pals of mine. I'm trying to maximize my efforts to go nearly entirely digital, while retaining my hand-done painting style.

This piece is done in Adobe Photoshop... the final will be on a white background, so you won't get the cool nighttime effect as the version I have here.

note the shrunken head on the mirror.

The portrait is from my sketchbook, scanned, ported into photoshop, shrunken and painted. It looks like a lot of wasted effort, but if this is to be enlarged, I need a much detail as I can get.

Jason, you've never looked meaner.

Here's some Zombie Hillbillies feasting on human flesh around a ho-down bonfire.

Friday, January 29, 2010

here's an element for the dvd box for the Deadneks i'm working on. i thought it worked well with the theme, but the producer wants to be sure it's contractually kosher. the issue could be that my "lil Abner" style drawing of Brenna Lee Roth (daughter of David Lee Roth) may not be the same as a head shot photograph.

wait and see. i think it goes well with the beer-splattered hillbilly rock n roll that's inside the box.

my first tattoo attempt. i think it should be a lick-n-stick tattoo that comes with the feature. made the ribbon a bit like lips - thought it added to the cheesecake. researched the heck out of tattoo lettering. wanted old school type, none of the gothic/high german stuff. smoke-filled, honkey-tonk, wharf-dive tattoo font.

Monday, January 25, 2010

I've got a real soft spot for 1950s-80s Japanese cartoons.As a kid/teen/college student, I loved the complexity of the stories, sympathetic villains, and flawed heroes. The Japanese writers were creating far deeper characters than the Hana Barbara / Disney studio mills. Although Disney always had smoother action between the keyframes, the smaller budget "Japanimation" studios made up for with action and storyline.

I posted the trailer for the "Spaceship Yamato" live action movie, scheduled out in Japan in 2010. The animated series was a big hit with me, called "Star Blazers" in the USA during the 70s & 80s. The premise is that the last hope of planet earth is to raise the WW2 Japanese warship "Yamato" from the depths of the Pacific and fit her out for inter-stellar travel...

plausible...

The rest is shoot 'em up travels as they travel to a distant planet to retrieve the ultimate weapon that will save the earth from a marauding horde of conquering aliens.

I don't know... it's fun to see the use of CGI used on something so imaginative. I just hope they dub it and release the DVD here...

Sunday, January 24, 2010

I had a friend named Joey... Joey Fang. He's got a psycho-billy band... The DEADNEKs. They're making a DVD.

I'm researching some old horror genre posters, plus trying some techniques I'm using in my illustrations. I'm hoping to keep the design heavier towards illustration. This is the initial "sketch" using a still shot of the main actress (forgot her name) and some really rough shots of the band. That's Joey in the "O".

Background is the Skull from the University of Hartford drawing studio, also used as a model in the Elvis tribute piece of a few weeks ago.

This is raw, but i think it has elements in it that I'll be using in the final version. comments?

Saturday, January 16, 2010

I did it through neglecting a piece of regular maintenance; Changing the timing belt every 90K miles.

I was headed to work, and the belt snapped after cresting an incline: Half of the valves on the top end of the dual overhead cam engine bent to heck. At 193K miles, the Prelude could have been good for 250K, but I missed my chance. I had to close the lid on the engine and make a hard choice. Replace the engine and do other needed front end work for $2K, or move on to a larger, newer vehicle that could handle carrying my framed work, studio supplies and has the same reliability. I chose the latter.

my darling daughter (in need of hours of behind the wheel practice) and i drove a 180 mile loop today, test driving cars within my 4x4x4 range - 4 doors x 4 cylinders x $4,000. We tried various cars, but at the end of the day - i went with familiarity.

daughter wanted me to get the banana colored 2000 audi A4 - i couldn't see myself trying to blend in with a pack of traffic in a car that looked like a school bus. she's mad at me for not buying it.

i also drove sharp BMW convertible, but i saw it puff smoke as i made a U turn on my test drive... sorry.

i dropped a deposit on a 12 year old, one owner 318i. it's the last 4 cylinder bmw sold here before the introduction of the Mini. i've owned a 1975 2002 and a 1985 535i, which this car reminds me of as a hybrid of both. i took it out on I-95 near Quantico Marine Base, opened it up and tossed it around... tight.

just need it to get me up the road and back each day. it should do fine.

daughter is mad at me - said it looks old and boxy - would rather be dropped off at the prom in the minivan. she had her eye on the Prelude as her first car, and was nearly tearing up as I broke the news that I couldn't afford to drop the money into it.

Sleeping Cowboy, oil study from 1998. This piece is a classic academic lighting problem. Creating mood and atmosphere with light, bounced light and contrast. This is a piece from an advanced painting class with Renee Fuchs at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Our model was one of Renee's favorites - lanky.

We shot reference in Rittenhouse Square Park in morning light with some very nice shadows, and also back in the studio with more controlled, bounced and yellow/orange gels - You can make a fantastic bounced color gel by wrapping a piece of cardboard with a yard of brightly colored fabric, then bouncing strong white light off of it and onto your model. This method is generally used as a secondary light source side light or under light.

We got two sessions with the model, and I chose to paint from the studio situation, with the model present and falling back on the studio photographs as reference... well, not really at all, since I painted directly from life with this one. I fudged in a lonely Tonopah Nevada background I had photographed in the 1980s... like a moon scape.

My dear mother-in-law has this piece. It goes with her post and beam home, very well.

I've been pondering this whole coaster buggy situation... my dad never used this contraption for bricks. He made it for the kids, which I'm sure he was just trying to thin the herd a bit. It was built from a lawnmower with steering that had three positions; center, hard left, hard right. I wrote "nearly" 100 lbs, but it was well over that with the all steel frame.

The framework was a feature that was able to be hosed off when bloodied and pulled to the top of the hill again... did I mention the hill a 1/2 mile long when you coasted down to the bridge over the creek... having avoided the barbed wire fence when making the turn.

I made it, but there were plenty of kids walking with limps where the road rash went straight to the bone.

Friday, January 1, 2010

nothing as hopeful as a farmer or gardener. the toil of labor and the onslaught of the troubles of the world try to stop his progression. he waits for the renewal of spring and the harvest to come.

this came from a dream i had in 2006, which was sketched in my sketchbook, and digitally reworked this evening in Photoshop. It has a strong mandala quality to it, though a thoroughly threatening border surrounds the subject.